A big big thank you to my housemate Woolhelmina for creating our Dolly, dubbed by Scientific American as the “world’s most famous sheep” after her landmark role in cloning research. Woolhelmina put together the design from scratch, and even Dolly’s facial wool ‘side-burns’ are an accurate representation from google images. Her fleece is made from bobble stitch, where you build a ball of stitches onto a single stitch. Just how much you can do with essentially glorified string and sticks keeps on astonishing me.

I’ve just finished my pattern for the early classical genetics years. Quite frankly it nearly killed me, not sure I’ve ever had a challenge like condensing and transforming over a hundred years of scientific work into an arts-and-craft plan. I don’t think I’ve ever been so grateful for Wikipedia too…

Doing it made me realise just how much of us is going to be in the final piece. In the beginning, I thought the size of each bit of knitting was going to end up roughly correspondent to the time over which the science developed, so we’d end up with a whole that was vaguely chronological, and proportionate to time. But I’m not doing this instinctively, and keep having to check that I’m doing it at all (partly why I’ve added dates to the map).

What’s really been driving the shape of the plan is the importance I assign to each event, career, or development; and I guess what’s mostly imbued these ideas in me is my education and the prominence of the events and figures today. For instance the biggest, brightest and most attention grabbing so far is Darwin’s bit. Pretty obvious why he’s on my mind as significant, he’s bloody everywhere! Second largest is Mendel, drummed into every schoolchild, and third Francis Galton, who infamously laid the foundations of eugenics. As well as imposing my own development as a knitter on the piece, I’m also refracting the science through my history and experiences.

When I was drawing it I was nearly exclusively bouncing from one Wiki link to another: I’d draw a bit for one scientist or field, and then look for a development or apprentice’s work to represent in the next and connected piece of knitting. I’ve been studying some narrative theory and there seem to be some parallels there too, in the way I was looking at pages and pages of information, but using causal links to navigate it all and tie pieces together.

I found a new tool to aid my one handed knitting attempts! Her names is Knitting Nancy. She was found lurking in my parents’ house. Using the four staples that protrude from her head (no wonder she looks fed up) you can create a long piece of what’s called French Knitting. It looks a bit like a long worm – I can’t think how else to describe it!

We decided to use this pink fluffy ‘wool’ to represent Industry. The ‘wool’ is synthetic, which we thought apt, and somewhat alien in appearance. Our Industrial worm will weave its way into the various fields of genetics that emerged after the genetic code had been cracked, and DNA sequencing had been made possible.

Thank you to the highly organised team who coordinated the search for this beautiful yellow and gold Nobel prize winning yarn. As we read about the history of genetics, we noticed a cluster of Nobel prizes in the field between the late 1950’s and the mid 1960’s, when the genetic code was understood. Here they are:

1957 – Alexander Robertus Todd received the Nobel Prize for chemistry for synthesising chemicals leading to the discovery of the structure of DNA.

1958 – Beadle and Tatum received the Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology for demonstrating that one gene controls the production of one enzyme.

1959 – Arthur Kornberg received the Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology for demonstrating that DNA can copy itself.

1962 – Watson and Crick received the Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology for their discovery of the structure of DNA.

1965 – Jacob and Monod received the Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology for demonstrating how genes are switched on and off.

His work was rediscovered in 1900, 35 years after he published his paper, so I’m cracking on with knitting this. Completely by chance, three different scientists came across it independently: Hugo de Vries from Holland, Carl Correns from Germany, and Erich von Tschermak from Austria. We’ve decided to represented this through their national flags, so above I’m working on Hugo de Vries’s discovery.

It’s a bit knotty and wonky next to our lovely pea, but how can you compare with so simple and elegant a theory?

This isn’t the best picture and it certainly doesn’t do the peas justice but I think it merits being posted. Huge thank you to our expert knitter for creating this beautiful knitted pea pod. Mendel would have been proud.

Mendel is often considered the father of modern genetics. At the time, his theory of genetic inheritance was largely ignored. It was not until it was rediscovered in the early 20th century that it all started making a bit more sense…

At last I have managed to contribute something to our growing creation! Hannah very kindly showed me how to finger knit. This more rudimentary form of knitting will be used to represent Walther Flemming’s discovery of material in the nucleus that he called chromatin. What he saw was later identified as chromosomes, meaning coloured bodies. As needle-fingered Sue said, I’m using purple wool: this was the colour of the dye he used. Rudimentary knitting is appropriate because Flemming failed to make the connection between his work genetic inheritance because he was unaware of the work done by Mendel.

The next challenge for me is crochet, which I’m reliably informed I can do one handed! This is a different technique to knitting, although it uses the same materials, so we’ll have to think carefully about how we can include it in our creation.

In case this all seems a little abstract, here are a few maps of what is going to happen.

Turning a chronological timeline of historical events into a knitting plan hasn’t been easy and each of us has had a fair shot at it. It’s still a work in progress and develops as we discover what we can and can’t achieve with our knitting needles, but also as we begin to better understand the science of genetics and how the important events link together.

We’re not claiming to represent every single event in every stitch. We want to show our interpretation of it.

Ta muchly everyone for your wool donations, we’ve now got a selection worthy of a world-changing scientific field. We’ve got grand plans for the purple, which is being transformed into Walther Flemming’s experiments with mauve dye on the behaviour of chromosomes by Cast-on Clarissa. Drop-stitch Dorothy has earmarked some lovely red for a flavr savr tomato, and blue, red, white, black and yellow is being knitted into the national flags of the groups which rediscovered Mendel.

We’re still hunting for the perfect yarn to become dolly the sheep, and some golden yellow to make Nobel prize-representing pompoms if anyone has some spare…